The wildest story I've read recently, plus my favorite tech predictions for 2026

Dear Friends,

The wildest story I’ve read recently begins in the spring of 2016, when Shane Harris, now an investigative reporter at The Atlantic, emailed an address on a cybersecurity message board purporting to be an Iranian hacker. “My name is Mohammad Hossein Tajik,” a man responded. “I am 35 but very older — like 999 years older in the heart and in the ass!”

The man might have once been a CIA asset; he certainly knew a lot of Iranian secrets. He described himself as “a double — turning into a triple and later a nothing/everything/ticking-bomb.” His father was one of the original revolutionaries who stormed the Shah’s secret-police headquarters and helped create Iran’s intelligence service. And then, one day, Mohammad stopped responding. He might, the rumors went, have been murdered by his own father. Now, years later, Shane has tracked down what actually happened—or at least as much of it as is possible to find. The result, “They Killed My Source,” is heartbreaking, revelatory, and very weird.

I was also utterly captivated by Rachel Aviv’s new profile in The New Yorker of Oliver Sacks, a man who I had previously regarded as something of a scientific saint who matched scientific rigor with gorgeous storytelling. Well, it turns out that the science might not have been so rigorous: many of his best-known stories, like the autistic twins reciting impossibly long prime numbers and the Parkinson’s patient speaking of Rilke, appear to have been augmented by Sacks’ own imagination. “I write out symbolic versions of myself,” he confessed in his journal. 

But this isn’t just a story of embellishment; it’s a story about a man struggling deeply with his sexuality and loneliness. His mother, after all, called homosexuality an “abomination,” “the filth of the bowel,” and she told him she wished he’d never been born. He spent most of his life alone, struggling with memory, and deeply saddened. The sins are not forgivable, but at least one can understand.

For something lighter, if not entirely so, read this Esquire story about a struggling actor who finds a financial reprieve by playing Santa at Macy’s. The story is at times quite funny: The Santa suits were stored “in an old meat locker,” and a Santa once put on his coat only to discover a glue trap with a still-wriggling mouse stuck to it. But people also say all kinds of things to Santa. “When my daddy beats my mommy,” one boy said, “nurse Barbie can fix her.” Playing a figure like that isn’t easy on the psyche, particularly for men who are broken themselves. And then there's the story Bob tells every year about two little girls in downtrodden coats, and what happened when their mother said, “You know Santa don't come to our house for Christmas.”

I enjoyed this MIT Tech Review guide to the starter tools we’ll need after the apocalypse. I also enjoyed Andreessen Horowitz’s three-part series of predictions on the biggest technological advancements of 2026. It includes a bananas theory that we'll soon be able to literally step into videos. And I couldn’t stop reading Benjamin Wallace’s book about his obsessive 15-year hunt for Satoshi Nakamoto, which began with an assignment by my former colleague Jason Tanz at WIRED. You can also read an excerpt here, which accounts among other things how Wallace travels 37 hours for a three-minute conversation with James Donald, a cranky and paranoid programmer in Australia who had once written, “I know who Nakamoto was, and what his political and social goals were.” Donald is not, it turns out, a plausible Satoshi candidate. 

I should add that if you actually know who Satoshi is—or have a new theory on how to use modern AI to figure it out—please do email me at my protonmail account. (It’s my Twitter handle @protonmail.com). I edited an early story about trying to track him down; I love the fact that the strongest candidate in many ways seems to have an alibi from a half-marathon he ran; and I was besieged by fake Satoshis while working as editor of WIRED. It’s the biggest mystery in tech. And one day, I hope, we’ll know.

You also should absolutely read the story of “Operation Golden Dynamite” and how María Corina Machado escaped from Venezuela in order to go and collect her Nobel Peace Prize this month. “This is a counterintel guy’s dream or nightmare,” the man who led the operation, which started in a fishing boat and ended in Oslo, said. “I am alive, safe, and very grateful,” she says when the ordeal ends.

Christmas is coming up, and I of course would love it if you’ll gift your loved ones a copy of my new book The Running Ground. I’ve found that one of the demographics that most likes it are the spouses of obsessive runners who read it and then have a better sense of why their loved one spends so much time in this crazy sport.

Last, I’ve just launched a YouTube channel, where I’ll be posting my longer interviews about running as well as my daily videos. I was a passionate Google Plus user back in the day, and I’m about 15 years late to this platform. But as the old proverb goes… 

The Most Interesting Things in Tech

On Thursday night, Trump issued an executive order that attempts to override state regulation on AI. The administration says the current patchwork of legislation is too limiting for AI companies, which could hurt the U.S. in the race against China. We’ll see if this order is even legal, but I disagree with the notion that we need to ditch legislative norms to beat China. Often, the best path to smart, effective policies is for states to come up with them first, see how they work, and then Congress establishes something at a national level. Neutering their ability to do that might actually be counterproductive.

I do, however, agree with Australia’s new law banning social media use for children under 16. Lots of studies show that mental health outcomes for young people are better the less time they spend online—and they’re spending a crazy amount of time online. New research from Pew says that 21% of Americans aged 13-17 are on TikTok “almost constantly.” Reddit just sued the Australian government to block this, so we’ll see if it stands, but I hope it's successful and that other countries follow suit.

Some good news: OpenAI, Anthropic, and Block announced the creation of the Agentic AI Foundation, an organization that will help ensure the underlying architectures of future AI agents are interoperable and largely open source. The companies are passing ownership of some protocols to the foundation, where developers can contribute to them. There's still much to play out, but this should make the agentic web more democratic and easier for agents to communicate with each other.

Finally, earlier this week, I attended a lunch with Sam Altman and a group of media industry folks. He was quite forthcoming about a range of topics, including OpenAI's competition, progress in explainability, risks of increasing income inequality, and why he thinks the devices of the future will run AI locally. You can listen to my top takeaways here.

Cheers * N

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